Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Hundred Flowers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Redemption
Journeys and Growth
Suffering, Strength, and Resilience
Home and Family
The Promises and Failures of Communism
Summary
Analysis
With Tao back in school, Kai Ying makes her first trip in months to the public security administration to see if she can learn anything about Sheng. She sits in the airless waiting room, fretting about the lost business this errand costs her, until a young woman shows her into Comrade Cheng’s office. Cheng, a heavyset, sweaty man, pours Kai Ying a cup of weak tea and then sprawls at his desk, staring at her. Haltingly, she explains that she wants to know about Sheng, whom she hasn’t heard from in nine months. Cheng says he can’t do much to help her, since so many men get sent to the labor camps each day. He asks what she can give him in exchange.
Since Sheng left, Kai Ying has tried to maintain her family’s precarious balance essentially by herself: she attends to her patients, earns money, runs the errands, and cares for young Tao and the aged Wei—whose sense of guilt and helplessness makes his needs child-like too. She even tries to look after Sheng from afar. It’s clearly too much work for one person to do; fulfilling her obligations towards her husband in this instance pulls her away from other obligations to her patients and to supporting the family as the only breadwinner. She needs others, especially Wei, to take responsibility for their roles in the family.
Themes
Kai Ying tries to appeal to Cheng’s family responsibility by mentioning Tao. Brusquely, Cheng says that Sheng could have considered his family before writing his counterrevolutionary letter. He looks Kai Ying up and down and makes a thinly veiled suggestion that he will help if she has sex with him. Kai Ying swallows her horror, then offers him an envelope of cash because that is “the way things [are] done.” He takes it with the promise that his offer remains open.
The interview with Comrade Cheng points toward the many ways in which the Communist Party disrespects the idea of family, both by splitting families like the Lees up as punishment but also by disregarding the promises and obligations that bring husbands and wives together. Cheng’s proposition suggests that he cares only about his own appetites—the charge that reformers made against the Party as a whole during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
Themes
